The Right Thing
by dwarrowlass
Summary: A standalone story about how it came to be that Guy sold Isabella to Thornton. Our poor lonely little boy! A wee bit angsty, as Guy is wont to be. It all takes place in France, when they were young. With a brief ramble at the beginning re: my feelings about these poor tragic siblings.


A/N: I find Isabella really fascinating – she's the untreated victim of abuse, she uses all the traditional "women's weapons" (poisons, powders, words) like some kind of proto-witch, she's reactive and spontaneous; she's just flailing around trying to protect herself. She tells everybody what she thinks they want to hear but when there's more than one person there she panics and her lies go wild. Her trauma trapped her in an increasingly murderous childhood, but she's capable of real kindness and vulnerable to real fear. Basically I'm obsessed with her.

On the other hand I think Robin is kind of a dick. He almost gets Guy hanged for murder, and the only consequence is a gentle nudge from his loving father. The worst day of Guy's life – the day he loses both his parents, his home, his standing in the world, and is left with the sister he fails to protect – is one of the shiningest threads in the rich golden tapestry of Robin Hood's life. All that is beside the point of saying, basically, Guy had a lot to deal with.

Which is why I'm a Guy apologist. Sorry. I'm apologizing for being a Guy apologist.

Okay, onto the actual story!

…

On the journey to France Guy was devastatingly seasick. Looking back, he was grateful; it prevented him from having to think about anything. His parents had died – been murdered, he often thought. The estate he ought to have inherited, and which he could have used to shelter his sister, had been stripped from him. Isabella's grief was as strange and lonely and as inward-turning as his own, and he could not reach her. Often he could not muster the strength to try.

No home, no rank, no family. No home, no rank, no family. The mantra seemed to replace his heartbeat. A personal Apocalypse had ripped Guy's world apart. Yes, it was certainly easier to stare at the roiling waves and wonder if he was going to retch again than it was to think of the life he had lost. But eventually they arrived in Calais, and his new life – if such he could call it – inevitably began.

Guy was a heavy-browed and angry youth, with a brooding young sister in tow. They were passed from relative to even more distant relative. Guy did not expect to be loved by them; he did not love them; and soon their faces ran together. His only memories of the many homes where they stayed were not of people, but of moments. Heavily embroidered curtains that could not keep out the draft. A little lizard clinging to the wall of a stone chalet in the sun. Isabella's birthday, a baffling affair where they were surrounded by strangers and Isabella was given gifts suited to a much younger girl. One male relative – an uncle, or maybe a cousin? – gave Guy lessons in how to use a sword. He couldn't remember the man's face or even his name, but he remembered the feel of the leather-wrapped pommel of the sword, heavy and blunt, and the sound it made against the chipped wooden buckler of the practice dummy.

After a while they drifted, like sediment, to the mostly-abandoned home of a great-aunt. She lived in one wing while the rest of the palatial house went to ruin. The staff was old and silent and sour; the rooms were dusty; the food was sparse. Guy chafed at this charity, thin though it was. He longed to go out and earn his fortune – but he couldn't abandon his sister, strange as she had become.

Isabella had always been a changeable child. She had fey moods, where she would laugh and dance and charm the birds from the trees, but they could give way without warning to periods of black despair. Ghislaine could stroke her hair and cajole her back to merriness; but after their mother's death, Isabella was nearly always silent and sullen. At times it seemed she wasn't all there.

Inconveniently, none of this prevented her from becoming very beautiful. Even the great-aunt noticed it; she uncharacteristically roused herself to order gowns made for the girl, and to organize a grim and tedious coming-out ball. Isabella spent it, wild-eyed and thin-lipped and very lovely in her first new garment in years, a red velvet dress cut to make the most of her growing figure, refusing to speak with Guy or accept his congratulations. Soon the aunt tired of them and they were sent on, to a house in Normandy, to live with a stranger whose blood ties were arguable at best.

Thornton was staying there too.

Guy admired him at once. He was a young man with a confident manner and easy charm, as unlike the ill-at-ease, angry boy as could be. In some ways he reminded Guy of his father – not at the end, of course, but before Roger had left for the Crusades. They were both tall men with close-cropped beards; he had the same liquid, fluent grasp of French, the courtly manners; he was a man of property who understood business. He also treated Guy like a man. Guy was almost pathetically grateful.

But when Thornton approached him with an offer of money for Isabella's hand, Guy hesitated. Isabella was only just thirteen. He would have preferred to wait a year or two before seeing her married – but he had promised his mother to take care of his sister, and Thornton persuaded him that the money he offered was proof of his ability to give Isabella what she needed. He would provide gowns, a stately home, an entry into the society of England. He would craft the setting for the jewel that Isabella was becoming.

His intensity was a little disquieting; but Guy signed the contract. Thornton left ahead of them, and after he was gone Guy informed Isabella of the engagement he had made on her behalf. She received the news with neither joy nor alarm. On an impulse Guy kissed her forehead; he was only eighteen, and the gesture was awkwardly given and stoically endured.

Isabella was to depart almost immediately. Thornton had insisted on it. She packed her trousseau, slender though it was, the core of which were the few nice pieces of Ghislaine's jewelry that they had managed to sneak away before the Gisborne estate was seized. After a surreal week Guy handed her into a waiting coach.

She surprised him by suddenly turning around and grasping his hands. "_Don't send me away_," she said.

"What?" He was further dismayed when Isabella burst into tears.

"Please don't send me away," she wept. "I want to stay with you."

"Squire Thornton will take care of you," Guy said numbly. "He promised."

"But I don't want to go!" His sister, the girl who confused and bewildered him, who turned away his attempts at kindness and understanding, was sobbing like her heart was tearing in two. "Please, Guy. Please. I'll be good."

"You'll have a chance at a real home," Guy said. He was desperate. He had signed a contract, like a man of business. Already Thornton was making arrangements to send money – money on which he would build his future. His family's future! "You'll have a reputation! Isabella, this is good. This is right."

"Please, brother. Let me stay. Please don't make me go."

Guy stood silently for a while. He didn't know what to say. At last he disentangled his hands from hers; her tears renewed, she was nearly choking, gasping for breath. He closed the coach door and indicated for the coachman to go, to bring her to the port where she would board the ship to England. To her new life, with her new husband. "Please," she cried, as the horses picked up their heads and the coach began to roll away. Her voice grew shrill. "Please, Guy, brother. Please! _Don't make me go!_"

Eventually he couldn't hear her anymore. He went inside, to wait in the alien house in Normandy that wasn't his home, and that was somehow even emptier of meaning with his sister gone. When the money arrived he would be able to go. Not much longer would he have to endure this half-life, haunting the edges of other people's lives. He would start anew. He would reclaim the Gisborne name.

There was a sick feeling in Guy's stomach, a deep and twisted knot. She had begged to stay and he had made her go. It made him wince to think of it, like probing a cut, and so he shied away from thinking about too deeply. But he suspected he have may have done a wrong thing – a bad thing.

In time, this feeling turned to certainty. Later, the certainty became familiar, a constant, almost comforting.

Finally, it was the only family Guy of Gisborne had.


End file.
